When my daughter was 4, she suffered from terrible ear infections. The poor girl had 11 ear infections in 9 months before we finally got her tubes. The tubes have been great, and she hasn’t had an ear infection in almost a year.

Each and every time the pediatrician or ENT would check her ears for that 11 months, they always asked the same question – “Can she hear you?”

And my response each and every time? “Yes, she can hear me. She just doesn’t listen.”

Actually, it’s not so much that she doesn’t listen. It’s that she (and both of her brothers, to be fair) are masters of selectively listening. I can yell at them to clean their rooms at the top of my lungs, and no one hears a word I say. I hide in my bedroom under the blankets to take a bite of a Hershey bar, and they can hear the wrapper opening from outside.

My kids can hear the words “chocolate,” “playground” and “McDonald’s” spoken sotto voce from 500 yards away, across the street, over traffic noise.

But if I say “clean,” “no,” “stop” or “eat your green beans,” apparently I sound like the teacher from Charlie Brown.  Wha, wha, wha, wha.

I must confess. I am a yeller – due in large part to the selective listening (and not from any genetic predisposition I may have given the fact that my mother was a yeller, her mother was a yeller, and so on and so on and so on. Nope. It’s the selective listening that’s to blame. Don’t judge!).  I am not ashamed of the fact that I’m a yeller. I am ashamed of the fact that it doesn’t seem to change my kids’ behavior in the least.

My mother – now there was a yeller. She hollered at us to clean our rooms, and the kids down the street were rushing to pick up their toys and make their beds. It was a wonder to behold.

Me? My kids laugh at me when I yell. I asked my daughter once whether she wanted me to yell at her. Her reply?

“I like it when you yell. It makes your face all crazy.” (Cut to me crawling under the covers for another bite of my Hershey bar.)

I remember reading in some parenting book that a milestone of early toddlerhood is following a multistep command – go get the cup from the coffee table and bring it to the kitchen. And in early toddlerhood, my kids were only too happy to follow my directions. They would gleefully get the cup on the coffee table and skip into the kitchen with it, where they were greeted with hugs, kisses, and choruses of “what a good kid you are.”

Now, a simple request to pick their underwear up off of the floor or to stop wearing said underwear on their heads is apparently too much to ask. They hear me, as evidenced by the whining and eye-rolling that follows such simple requests, but do they listen?

The other day, I asked my 5 year old son when he was going to listen to me.

He said, “Next Tuesday.”

I’m really looking forward to next Tuesday.